Le Désert de Suez. Cinq mois dans l'Isthme (review)

Who better than Barabara Wright to re-edit for the first time since 1863 the epistolary account of an official trip to Egypt by the mid-nineteenth-century Orientalist painter, Narcisse Berchère—especially since the letters were written to none other than Eugène Fromentin? Wright, whose work on Fromentin and on word/image questions is well known, has not only brought us Berchère's text in an accessible, large-format, paperback edition, but also includes in her edition plates representing twenty of the sixty drawings made by Berchère in Egypt in fulfillment of his formal assignment: produce a pictorial account of the first phase of the Suez Canal's construction.

Wright also provides a careful and insightful Introduction, the fruit of archival research in the area of art and aesthetics (at the Musée Gustave Moreau and the Musée municipal d'Etampes) and in that of the history of work (at the Centre des Archives du Monde du Travail (CAMT) at Roubaix), among others. The Introduction first traces the history of the Suez Canal project, drawing attention to its links with Saint-Simonian ideology which melded idealism and scientific progress, utopian longings and technological accomplishment. Secondly, Wright introduces Berchère himself— his career as an Orientalist painter, his friendships with other artists such Gustave Moreau and Eugène Fromentin (with whom he would travel to Egypt in 1869 as part of a select group of French and English citizens invited for the official inauguration of the Suez Canal), and his official pictorial mission in 1861-1862. The Introduction's third part examines Berchère's text itself. Wright identifies the artist's pictorial vision, conveyed in his often impressionistic word pictures; his colonial vision, revealed in his word choice and use of poetic images; and his poetic vision of the desert, revealed through his own style and intertextuality. While Wright's Bibliography cites works through 2006, students of colonialism and post-colonialism might find the theory she uses in the last three pages of her Introduction (Roland Barthes's Mythologies (1957), Edward Said's Orientalism (in the 1980 French translation) to be outdated.

Wright's edition of Berchère's journey through the desert under transformation will offer fertile ground to specialists in a broad spectrum of intellectual pursuits, ranging from Eugène Fromentin and Ferdinand de Lesseps to the history and aesthetics of the travel narrative, word/image studies, pictorial and discursive representations of the Orient, the history of technology and work, the ideologies and politics of the Second Empire, and both colonial and post-colonial studies.

I would like to offer only one example of how this edition offers scholars new material for study and analysis. I was intrigued by the disjunction between Berchère's verbal representation of the lowliest native workers, the Fellahs, and his pictorial representation of them. Berchère offers descriptions of how the canal's digging was organized on two occasions. In the first a French foreman he meets recounts how in the beginning the trench diggers would refuse to obey orders and would often desert en masse: "il nous a fallu faire usage de notre prestige d'Européens et employer à la fois et l'autorité de la parole qui nous fait craindre, et le bras qui réprime: si plusieurs peutêtre ont été au-delà des limites permises, un juste blâme les a ramenés au devoir; mais le jour où livrés à nos seules forces, l'on nous demandait d'exiger deux ou trois mètres cubes de déblais par homme, que serions-nous devenues si nous n'eussions pas eu entre les mains l'autorité nécessaire pour faire exécuter le travail" (42)? The foreman refutes claims that the French mistreated the native workers, saying that the situation improved once the workers realized that they would be housed, fed and paid. He also cites a...